ALLEY OOP THE FIRST TIME-TRAVEL ADVENTURES 1939-1942

Never before collected: four years of rare Alley Oop Daily Strips! Alley Oop's time-traveling adventures begin! Join Alley as he fights in the Trojan War, joins Ulysses' Odyssey, visits Cleopatra's Egypt, sails the Spanish Main, plunges into World War II, and more! You've seen the Sunday pages; now enjoy the daily strips, all featuring the time-travel stories, from the very beginning. Beautifully restored from 1939-1942 in this oversize and impressively thick hardcover. The dailies are part of the same continuity as the Sundays, but as common on many strips, the Sundays were written so that you could keep up with the story even if you hadn't read the dailies all week long. From Paul Tumey, on the Comics Journal website, talking about the first year of Alley's time travel adventures: "This sequence of comic strips is, in my mind, a touchpoint of the school of clever and skillful meta-storytelling; a breakthrough example of a series growing, stretching, and turning itself inside out. When a popular science fiction series like, say, J.J. Abrams' television show Fringe (2008-2013) used an impressive-looking device to yank characters from one alternate universe to another (and even in a memorable episode, into a cartooned simulacrum of reality with Leonard Nimoy as tour guide) and played with its own storylines and structure in artful and clever ways, believe  it or not, it was walking the same trail that Alley Oop helped blaze in 1939. "In early 1939, after seven years of penciling and inking the tens of thousands of crisply drawn rocks, trees, and pubic-hair-fuzzy loincloths that that constituted the prehistoric world of his popular daily comic strip, V. T. Hamlin created a time machine, pulled his anarchist-outsider caveman into the present (which in this case was 1939) and exploded his sharply defined fantasy with a precisely rendered blam." At its peak, Alley Oop was carried by 800 newspapers. Today, it still appears in more than 600. The strip and albums were popular in Mexico (under the name Trucutú) and in Brazil (Brucutu). In 1995, Alley Oop was one of 20 strips showcased in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative United States postage stamps. The introduction offers fine insight by Price, who worked directly with Hamlin later in life -- Hamlin lived to age 93, long enough to sign books for Kitchen Sink when they started an aborted series to reprint the best Alley Oop strips. Rush Service and International shipping would require an additional charge.